On Tuesday and Today I was able to travel with some missionaries, Bob and Georgette Kornegay, over to a feeding center in Rio Bravo, Suchitepequez. This community, which is about 2 hours away from Casa Shalom, is so poor that some children have died of starvation! About a year ago, some Guatemalans and Americans started working together to start a feeding program with a local pastor of the town. I was able to go with them to help transport more food for the program and see what was going on with the program.

The thing that was the biggest shocker to me was the pitiful local public school. It’s mostly just a few 4 foot cinderblock walls separating the classrooms that had old broken looking chairs and tables scattered around. No lights or chalkboards. Worse yet, no teachers! The teachers all come from long away, so they just cancel classes frequently so that they don’t have to make the trip. The school building was even built on land illegally, so they could lose that too.

The local pastor there has been working on building classrooms on the second story of the church in order to start a new school. The church is also where the feeding program is located, and a clean water system has been setup to provide the people with parasite free water.

My friends Josh and Jessica also help by bringing food on a regular basis, and they’ve posted pictures multiple times on their blog. I wish that I had some pictures from my visit, but I’ll see if I can get some from Bob. It was a very facinating experience and sobering to see that there’s always people in even more need than I’ve ever seen before.